Jia: blockchain-based lending for SMEs
Jia is connecting yield-seeking crypto to credit-starved SMEs.
Biography
Zach Marks is the co-founder of Jia, a startup using blockchain technology to extend credit and other financial services to SMEs in emerging markets. The company is active in Kenya and the Philippines. Jia has raised over $5M in equity, deployed $12M loans and has kept defaults under 0.1%.
Prior to Jia, Zach worked at Tala, a B2C credit fintech, for over 5 years. He also worked as a McKinsey consultant for over 2 years.
What problem is Jia solving?
Businesses in emerging markets struggle to access the credit they need to grow. Banks don’t serve them, and alternative lenders are often predatory or impractical. The result? A $4 trillion global credit gap, with businesses left stranded, unable to fulfill orders, pay workers on time, or scale.
Jia is closing that gap—helping high-quality SMEs unlock working capital by financing their invoices.
What’s your connection to that problem?
I’ve spent my career working on financial access in emerging markets. My first exposure was when I taught English in India, right out of college. My favorite ritual was my daily chai at the local tea stall. I saw how vital these businesses were to their communities and even wrote a blog about chai wallahs (roadside tea vendors) around the country. I noticed how difficult it was for them to access financing to expand their businesses. That’s what inspired me to focus on this problem.
I started working formally on financial inclusion at McKinsey. I worked on South Sudan’s national agriculture plan, trying to help farmers buy fertilizers on credit. We quickly saw the issue: banks weren’t lending to them. Their only options were informal, community-run microloans—super helpful, but unscalable. In search of something that could reach more people, I joined Tala, which was pioneering mobile phone-based lending.
Tala used peoples’ phone data to predict creditworthiness, compensating for the lack of formal credit score. This changed the game for consumers. But while individuals were getting access, small businesses were still left out. That’s where my co-founder, Cheng, and I saw an opportunity—if data could unlock capital for consumers, why not businesses? That realization led us to start Jia.
Why were there more B2C than B2B lending plays? Wouldn’t a B2B play be safer, less risky, higher-margin?
It’s a paradox. B2B lending is more logical—businesses have stronger repayment incentives, and their borrowing is tied to revenue-generating activities. But B2C lending is easier to scale.
Consumer lending apps can charge higher interest since people borrow out of necessity – for school fees or emergencies for example. Businesses, on the other hand, take their time deciding.
Consumer lending apps also have faster adoption – they can go viral with smart marketing, which is hard to get with businesses.
We realized B2B was being ignored, so we jumped in.
What lessons from Tala have you transposed to Jia?
The operational muscle of managing a multi-country lending operation. I learned that every country has its own regulation, fintech rails, and availability of underwriting data (as well as varying legal restrictions as to how one can use that data).
I also grasped what really mattered in the lending business. You can optimize your underwriting with AI all you want but at the end of the day, lending businesses are collection businesses. It’s easy to extend loan money, harder to get that money to come back with interest. The robustness of your collection processes (on top of good underwriting, of course) determines the viability of your lending business.
This ethos diffuses into the metrics we measure. It’s easy to use the amount lent as a success metric: how much of it is coming back?
RO insights: B2B2C lending play
Jia chose to pursue B2B over B2C lending. Other startups, such as Abhi in Pakistan, have taken a blended approach.
Abhi started with an earned wage access product (EWA), where employees can request their due salary (for the number of days worked) rather than wait for the end of the month. Abhi advances the sum and takes a cut.
Here’s how Omair Ansari, one of Abhi’s co-founders, explains the pertinence of that strategy:
“In Pakistan, credit-scoring data for B2C is scarce, despite Raast and 1link increasingly churning out useful insights. A Pakistani B2C credit play is further complicated by enforceability. Credit isn’t a disbursement but a collection business. In Pakistan, the infrastructure for a company to collect what it’s owed is still thin.
EWA minimizes both of those risks. The credit-scoring data we’re tapping is unambiguous, since it’s the individual’s salary. On the collection side, we’re collecting from the employer not the employee, which lightens the operational load.”
Excerpt from Abhi: earned wage access as a door to credit, originally published in The Realistic Optimist
What did your MVP look like?